A meticulously maintained iTunes library with ratings for each track lets you easily create best-of playlists to keep lame songs off your iPod. That’s great if you consistently rate music as your collection grows, but what if you’ve got a giant unrated library and no time to add stars to all those tracks? Enter AutoRate, a free application that—ahem!—automatically rates music based on current play count and frequency. Despite some limitations, it’s an easy way to start getting more from your music.
AutoRate will have you seeing stars in no time.
AutoRate rates your songs (but not TV shows or movies) or restores old ratings with a click, although restoring ratings can take a while. In Preferences, choose between rating your entire library or a specific playlist, set new ratings to apply to either already-rated or unrated tracks, and adjust the extent to which play count and frequency affect ratings. Other options force AutoRate to take your pre-existing ratings into account or work with an optional Automator action to apply half-star ratings and display them in iTunes. Half-stars reflect AutoRate’s calculations more accurately than whole numbers, if you’re a big stats geek. The minimal instructions don’t offer as much explanation as we’d like, but most users can sort it all out quickly enough.
Rating an entire library takes only a minute or so, and it’s time well spent if you have lots of unrated songs. Results from AutoRate’s default settings appeared accurate to us, and we appreciated the convenience of automatically rating music, then rerunning the application after a lengthy listening session to keep ratings current with our tastes.
The bottom line. If you’ve been remiss in your rating regimen, AutoRate can rank your tracks quickly and with surprising accuracy.
AUTORATE
iTunes
Automatically generates accurate music ratings. Rates the entire library or a specific playlist.
Rating restoration can be slow. Minimal documentation. Only rates music files.
Laurent
January 03, 2011 at 4:32pm
I'm surprised by one thing about iTunes. It is considered as one of the best application ever. I totally disagree and this is why. Having an account and living in the US (up to now everything sounds great:)), I have to give up on my own culture. I live in the US, but originally I'm from Europe. Sometimes, I'm trying to find a song or an album on the US iTunes store, but it's not available. However, when I do select on the flag of the country I'm originally from and looking for the same song or album, it is available. That being said, trying to buy it, it does send me back to the US iTunes store, and therefore unable to buy anything. How in the world this can happen? The conclusion of all this, is that I need to have a credit card and a billing address corresponding to the iTunes store I want to buy from. Crazy!!! In my eyes, that means that every human being who decides to relocate anywhere in the world can, as long as he keeps a bank account, credit card and billing address from his own country as long as he wants to buy and listen to the music he's been listening to for years before moving abroad. If anybody can figure this out, or tell Mr JOBS and his team about this crazy thing, it would be pretty awesome, because to be honest, I would have rather see Apple fixing this issue prior having The Beatles available:)
